Baiul Glides Easily From Obscurity to Stardom : Skating: Performing at the Sports Arena tonight, the Olympic champion captivates off the ice as well as she does on it.

Oksana Baiul had performed an exhibition the night before in West Virginia, slept little because she had to catch the first flight out that morning en route to another show in Los Angeles and did not eat at all.

“She’s anxious to get on the ice; she’s anxious to eat,” said one production company official, tracking Baiul’s moods by cellular telephone while awaiting her arrival at the Culver City Ice Arena. “She’s just anxious.”

But she could not have been more anxious than the members of the production company, who, with little more than 48 hours to prepare for tonight’s performance of “Skating Romance” at the Sports Arena, fretted about Baiul’s emotional availability.

Her reputation had preceded her. She is popular among figure skaters, but those who have toured with the 1994 Olympic champion say that her moods can swing from playful to serious to obstinate and back to playful in less time than it takes for her to complete a triple lutz.

They also say that she is incapable of hiding her feelings, a characteristic that serves her well as a performer. Audiences connect with the 17-year-old from Ukraine unlike any other figure skater in recent memory because they sense that she skates from the heart.

“She weaves a spell,” said Renee Roca, an ice dancer who, along with Brian Boitano, choreographed “Skating Romance,” and was among those waiting at Culver City to work with Baiul.

Anxiety heightened at the rink when it was reported that Baiul had declined a ride with the person assigned to meet her at the airport, choosing instead to go with an unidentified friend. Resigned to the probability that she would be late, the production company then had to be concerned that she might also be lost.

Late she was, but not lost. She arrived in a white Jeep, wearing a pink cashmere sweater with bare midriff, black jeans and high heels. She also had hair several shades more blonde than anyone there had ever seen her with.

She walked into the room used as operational headquarters, grabbed a bran muffin from the table with her left hand and broke the tension with a large, disarming smile.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, confidently extending her right hand. “I’m Oksana.”

Of course, she is. But she is not the same Oksana who 20 months ago dramatically emerged from the shadow of the Tonya and Nancy story to become, at 15, the youngest Olympic figure skating champion since Sonja Henie in 1928.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that it was an inner strength extraordinary for one so young that enabled Baiul to prevail in Norway.

She had to overcome so much--abandonment by her father, the death of her mother, the emigration to Canada of her first coach, and severe back and leg injuries suffered in a collision with another skater during practice on the day before the decisive Olympic freestyle program. But all the public saw was a shy, teen-age waif who cried often and never went anywhere without her guardians--her new coach, Galina Zmievskaya, and training partner Viktor Petrenko, the 1992 men’s figure skating champion.

Now, more mature with the approach in November of her 18th birthday, more confident with her gold medal and rave reviews, more financially secure with contracts estimated up to $3 million a year, and more worldly with her extensive travels and a move with Zmievskaya, Petrenko and Petrenko’s wife to Simsbury, Conn., Baiul is as much a presence off the ice as she is on.

She is not reluctant to speak her mind, in remarkably fluent English for someone who not even two years ago seemed to know only one word in that language: “Snickers.”

She does not yet have the same command of U.S. geography. When asked about her trip, she said she had come from near Miami.

“I thought you were in West Virginia,” someone said.

“Yes,” she said. “Florida.”

On this afternoon, she knew that she was in Los Angeles, but she was not so sure about the site of the only other live performance of “Skating Romance,” Sunday night at Peoria, Ill.

Boitano, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist who thought of, cast and directed the show and sold it to television for showing in February, is skating for the first time with Baiul after touring for several years with 1984 and ’88 gold medalist Katarina Witt of Germany.

“They’re both hard workers, and, obviously, both are very talented,” Boitano said. “The difference is that Oksana is even more of a perfectionist. When I choreograph for her, she wants to know, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? Why am I not doing this?’ She’s not difficult, just strong-minded.”

When told later that Boitano had said she was not difficult, Baiul laughed loudly.

“Of course, I am difficult,” she said. “It’s my life! It’s my job! I think I am very difficult. I want to know everything about my work. I have a lot of problems with people when I work. But I can’t think about whether they are in a good mood or bad mood. We have to work, you know. It’s just work.”

As hard as she might be on those around her, she is harder on herself, so hard that she has never watched her Olympic gold-medal freestyle program in its entirety.

“I think I skated not so good,” she said. Yet, it was Baiul on last summer’s tour of Olympic and world champions who tried to lift Boitano’s spirits after a disappointing performance.

“Bryushka,” she said, using a Russian diminutive, “you’re no robot.”

Boitano said, “Here I am, 31, learning something from her. Sometimes I think she’s 17 going on 30.”

Asked about that, Baiul said, “Many people say I am too old for my age. They say I have an old soul. I think maybe it is because I have had a lot of problems in my life that others my age haven’t had. I have had to grow up faster.”

Personally, she is more comfortable with older friends and, professionally, identifies with skaters from earlier generations such as Boitano, Petrenko and Kristi Yamaguchi. Although she will be only 19 during the next Winter Olympics in 1998 at Nagano, Japan, she said that she would not try to defend her title unless the International Skating Union liberalizes its rules to allow more artistic expression.

“I would like to go to the Olympics and try my nerves again,” she said. “But I would like more freedom as an artist--to skate in the spotlight, to music that is longer than three minutes, with words, and wearing whatever I want. As a professional, I can even skate naked!”

Told that she was endangering her reputation as a serious person, she feigned insult.

“I’m not a serious person!” she said. “I am a crazy girl!”

As an example, she said that she recently drove from Simsbury to New York--”I got there in an hour and 40 minutes; normal people take two hours and 30 minutes”--without telling Zmievskaya and had her hair dyed a golden blonde.

“A couple of days later, I said, ‘Oh my God, I did that!’ ” she said.

But she has not had her hair changed back to its natural color. And no one has told her that it looks anything but fine.